The Philip José Farmer Centennial Collection

This prodigious centennial celebration of SFWA Grand Master Farmer (1918–2009) is a superb retrospective of his seven decades as a writer. It features abundant stories that became his signature works, including “The Lovers” and “Mother,” both from the 1950s and memorable for their frank treatment of sexual themes that were then taboo in science fiction, as well as “Riverworld,” a foundational story for his multibook series of the same name about an afterlife world of endless resurrections and reincarnations. Farmer’s fondness for Tarzan, Doc Savage, and other fictional heroes led him to cast them in stories often incongruous with their pulp origins—such as “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod,” a clever Tarzan pastiche as though written by William S. (not Edgar Rice) Burroughs—and to treat them as real people deserving of authoritative analysis, as he recounts in the essay “Writing Doc’s Biography.” Croteau has organized Farmer’s work by decade, providing pithy overviews of his output and allowing Farmer to comment on it himself through reprints of autobiographical essays. This book is an exemplary tribute to one of science fiction’s postwar luminaries. Agent: Chris Lotts, Lotts Agency. (Aug.)